Chairman's Message

I am honored and delighted by my recent appointment as INPIM's Chairperson, and excited at the prospect of helping the network achieve its goals. For the coming six months, our new Executive Secretary Geert Diemer, myself and all the Washington-based INPIM team have set ourselves modest but important objectives.

We have embarked on our most immediate task, which is to help transform INPIM into a self-sustaining network, with financial independence and increased members' involvement in contributing ideas and action to the network.

An urgent step will be to organize a membership drive. We need to increase the current number of active members, and to broaden their range. Potential INPIM members include farmer representatives as well as staff from the public and private agencies concerned with the business of water and agriculture: irrigation and power agencies, donor agencies, consulting firms, universities, research institutions and non-governmental organizations. 

As agreed at the latest INPIM Board of Directors' meeting, we will also endeavor to broaden INPIM's focus to include the entire watershed. We are witnessing historical changes in water management issues. Water scarcity – a recent phenomenon in world history –compels us to re-think the ways water is allocated between the irrigation and other competing sectors. At the other end of the spectrum, climate irregularities and the El Nino climatic event - the worst in history – have brought devastating floods affecting mostly the poor, in particular in Bangladesh, China, and Central America. These events highlight the need to make INPIM's environmental concern explicit.

We would also like INPIM to increase the dissemination of training materials directly usable by INPIM's members. Our next products will be various studies on our updated web-site and a 30 minutes video of the highlights of the Bari Training-of-Trainers workshop on which we report in this issue.

Finally, the commitment of top government leaders is essential to make stakeholder participation happen. We would like to help place the INPIM approach – participation - on the international agenda, and to have INPIM present its work at the ``Vision for Water in the 21st Century", a global event (in The Hague, March 17-22, 2000) being developed at UNESCO headquarters. More on this will be included in the next issue.

With best wishes for the New Year,

Francois-Marie Patorni